Chapter 22
Scar
She’s asleep on her side with her back against my chest and my bare claw spread flat across her stomach. My offspring already grows under my palm.
I don’t have to be told and I don’t have to wait for a med tech.
I have slept in this bed beside this female for nine moon cycles, listened to her breathe through every one of those nights.
I have felt her hand land on my arm in her sleep and every single one of those times there were two layers of regulation fabric between her skin and mine.
I would come in off shift and pull on clean gloves and get into a bed with a female I was in love with, and lie six inches from her, and keep my hands covered all night in case she rolled over.
I put her boots on with covered claws. I held her hair off her neck on a bathroom floor while she was sick and I did it with a glove on. I have carried her home asleep from the compound more times than I can count and there has always, always been cloth between us.
And now I’m lying in that same bed with my bare hand flat on her bare stomach and my mouth against the back of her bare shoulder, and there is nothing between us anywhere at all.
I can put my claw wherever I want on this female. My lips can kiss her mouth, I can suck on her nipples and lick on that wonderous clit that brings her so much pleasure.
And there’s the soft skin of her hip. The dip of her waist. The line of her spine. She makes a small noise in her sleep every time and doesn’t wake, and I lie in the dark like a fool touching my mate’s back because I’m allowed to.
Meanwhile, my finger still hurts. I refused to go to the med lab because I want to be able to show it off amongst my crew and at the mine. It’s splinted, Leah did it in the kitchen when I first arrived home.
The bite on my shoulder has crusted over. There are four claw-lines down my chest that sting whenever I move, which is constantly, and a split lip from where my Bride punched me in the face in a fake forest.
I have never been so pleased about anything in my life.
Lucas is across the hall.
Leah and Hook have had him since yesterday.
Four diurnals of nothing but this female.
She wakes slowly.
I feel it before she moves, a change in her breathing, then a stretch that presses her whole length back against me, and then she goes very still as she remembers.
“Cayzor?” she breathes. She rolls over. And that’s the first time I see my Mara’s face in the morning as my mate, in our own bed.
She’s got a mark on her throat I put there. Her hair is a catastrophe. There’s a scrape along one shoulder from the grass.
“You’re staring,” she says.
“Yes.”
“Have you been staring long?”
“Some hours.”
“Cayzor.”
She reaches up and puts her bare palm flat against the ruined side of my face, and neither of us says anything for a while.
Then I kiss her.
I’m still new to this, always wanting to try this thing I’ve seen between mated pairs, but never getting to experience with Mara, until now. I kissed her last night, during the claiming but that was rough and frantic. This time is deep and careful, exploring what she feels like and how she tastes.
I kiss her until she’s breathless. I kiss her when she pulls back to say something and doesn’t get it out. I kiss the corner of her mouth and her jaw and the place under her ear that makes her shiver and then come back and do it all again. She gets both hands into my braids and holds on.
At some point she’s on her back and I’m braced over her.
“Nine months.” Her eyes are wet. “We wasted so much time.”
“No.” I put my forehead against hers. “We were waiting. It’s different.”
And I go back to kissing her and learn her body in the daylight. She has a line down her belly, low, a faint dark seam that wasn’t there before Lucas. And a silvery scatter of marks across her hips and the outsides of her thighs where her body stretched to make him.
She goes tense when I find those. “Don’t,” she whispers.
“Don’t what?”
“They’re not pretty. I know what they are, you don’t have to be nice about it…”
“You made an entire other person inside your body.” I look up at her. “Why would I want them gone?”
And then her small hand reaches down and wraps around my hard, leaking cock. And she’s stroking me how she knows I like.
The fever’s gone — properly gone, burned out in that forest — and what’s left is a male with all his faculties in a bed with his Bride, which is a different thing entirely and, I discover, considerably more dangerous.
Because last night I was an animal.
This morning I have to choose everything. Every place I put my hands. Every degree of pressure. The fangs, which I keep away from her skin with an effort she has no idea about. The claws, which stay curled.
And she leads. This morning is hers, and she is entirely unembarrassed about it. “There,” she says. “Slower. Slower, gods — like that.”
I do exactly what she tells me.
She puts her hand over mine and moves it where she wants it.
She tells me what to do with my mouth in language that would make my brothers proud of her.
When I get something right she makes a sound and I file the sound and the position and the pressure, all of it, because I intend to be extremely good at this and I have the rest of my life.
When I finally push into her she’s already come twice and she’s soft and open and swearing at me. She’s still too small. That doesn’t change. I go slowly and she takes me anyway, inch by inch, both hands flat on my chest.
“I love you,” she says.
“I love you.” I can barely get it out.
She starts to shudder and cry out, her orgasm racing through her body. And then I’m coming inside of her again, so hard it almost hurts, spilling so much seed inside of her it starts to run down her inner thigh.
Afterward Mara lies with her head on my chest and her leg thrown over mine and traces the claw-marks she left, which have started to itch.
“I’m staying with Minecorp,” she tells me.
“I know.”
“No, I mean officially. I sent it yesterday morning, before all of this happened. I accepted the position of permanent systems engineer for the whole Minecorp umbrella, based on Timbur.” She shrugs against me.
“Every holding they’ve got runs on Illibrium infrastructure and now every one of them runs through me. ”
“You’ll be off-planet?”
“Sometimes. Not much. And I’ll come back to a male who I’m certain is going to be the new head of the Miners’ Union, so I imagine you’ll be very interested in what I find out at the other sites.”
I chuckle, remembering how in fact I did recently put my name on that ballot.
We continue to talk for a long time after that.
About Daxon, who is bringing Darcy and Rayzon for a visit as soon as the ban lifts, which Grytel says is a matter of paperwork now and not permission.
About Grytel himself, who told me two diurnals ago that he’s resigning as Chief Executive of Timbur Minecorp.
He’s going to Chronos. House Vaszneth is leaderless and rotten from the elder down, and the succession has fallen — because there is nobody else left with clean hands and the right blood — to a minor cousin of a distant line whom nobody ever took seriously.
“I destroyed it,” he said. “It seems only fair that I be the one who has to live in it.”
I think he’ll be eaten alive over there. I’ve told him so. He said he’d take the risk, and then asked whether he could hold Lucas, which I allowed.
“There’s a thing I want to do,” I tell Mara, while we’re snacking on a human delicacy called popcorn.
“Mm.”
“About Lucas.”
“Yes?”
“I want to enter him into my line. Formally. On the Xylan registry. He’d carry my line and my name on every record in the Four Sectors, and he’d have standing according to the Scales of Xylan Law, and there isn’t a being anywhere who could ever say he doesn’t belong to this family.”
She gazes at me with wide eyes.
“There’s no impediment to it now. I couldn’t before. A male can only enter a child into his line if he’s the sire or the mate of the mother. I wasn’t either. Yesterday I became one.”
“He’d be your son.”
“He’s always been my son.”
“Oh my gosh.”
“He could be Lucas of One, because he’s the first Lucas, or he could be Lucas of Eighteen so he’s connected to my line. Which would you prefer?”
“Lucas of Eighteen.” She tries it out. “That’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard and I love it enormously.”
“He’ll be the only full human in the Four Sectors with a Xylan line number.”
She leans forward and kisses my lips. “And he’ll be the luckiest human to have you as his father.”
I hope you enjoyed Scar and Mara’s HEA. There’s more to come with Timbur and Chronos, stay tuned!:)